Zero Hour

IN LONDON ART SCHOOLS, there has been an intense flurry of activity and an extraordinary show of solidarity among staff which runs counter to the typically competitive atmosphere between the so-called “elite” institutions of the Royal College of Art, Goldsmiths College, University of the Arts London (including Central Saint Martins, London College of Fashion, the Chelsea, Camberwell, and Wimbledon Colleges of Arts, and London College of Communications), and the Slade School of Fine Art (University College London), where I work. Before the strike commenced, staff across these schools began sharing

previews January 2020

“Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium”

Curated by Lydia Yee

While visiting the Katja Seib exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ last year with my students, I asked them what they thought about the resurgence of figurative painting. The unworried looks I received confirmed that debates about painting the human after abstraction are now consigned to twentieth-century art history. And while the stakes around identity and representation have perhaps never been more contested, current discussions are conducted along lines quite distinct from those of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s–’70s, for example. In presenting work by artists including